Document processing devices include printers, copiers, scanners and e-mail gateways. More recently, devices employing two or more of these functions are found in office environments. These devices are referred to as multifunction peripherals (MFPs) or multifunction devices (MFDs). As used herein, MFP means any of the forgoing.
MFPs are typically provided with a fixed set of functions, such as printing, copying, scanning and e-mailing, that are available to device end users. MFPs can include options such as hole punching or stapling, printing in black and white or in color, and scanning to an image file or a text-inclusive file via optical character recognition. These, and other options, are typically selectable by device users via a user interface, such as a touchscreen display integrated into an MFP.
MFPs are configurable computing devices that can execute applications to extend the default printing, copying, scanning, and emailing capabilities. MFPs have limited memory for storing applications, and therefore administrators generally install applications on MFPs only when needed by end users. Different users may desire to have different applications, or use customized user interface options, that are available for download onto MFPs using an associated application store. Users can be hesitant to download new applications or customized user interfaces from the application store if they do not fully know what they would be downloading.
Adding example pictures of applications and customized user interfaces can assist users in finding suitable applications to download, but capturing suitable screenshots to use as pictures can be labor intensive and time consuming for programmers and system administrators. Further, every time that applications and customized user interfaces are updated the example pictures may need to be updated and refreshed as well, requiring additional work by programmers and system administrators. For example, to obtain a screenshot from an MFP to use as an example picture, a programmer or system administrator manually inserts a USB thumbdrive into an administrative USB port of the MFP. The USB thumbdrive executes a script to capture one or more screenshots from desired screens. The programmer or system administrator then takes the USB thumbdrive back to a personal computer and use a suitable program to manually upload the screenshots from the USB to the appropriate application in the MFP app store. This process is time consuming and can result in errors if the appropriate detail page for the application is not correctly identified by the programmer or administrator.